Wednesday, 4 February 2009

Summary to date

So far about 20 names have been added, only about 3% of the total list. I was distracted in January so only 3 names were added, compared to 17 in December. But I plan on doubling the list this month. This is not an attempt to debunk the 650 list, if that were the motivation I would stop now as there is already now plenty of material elsewhere on the internet for anyone objective to find which questions the list.

I am going to continue, get some more names added and to try and group the skeptics. Some of them share similar positions and arguments, some are quite distinct. Perhaps I will find a decent classification system to group these skeptics and any skeptics in future, including blog comment and forum skeptics (they don't have to be semi-famous).

It would be quite interesting to be able to assign a skeptic to a particular group for example and therefore be able to "stereotype" them by other members of that group.

The current method most people employ is to use a personal name to refer to all skeptics (eg "denier", "inactivist", "contrarian", etc). This is not particularly descriptive or representative of the disperse spread of credibility in different skeptics and I believe categories would capture information that could be exploited in debate (and I am essentially an arguer, so this is what I want)